Dear Fan-Boi

I like checking out peoples code experiments, it’s interesting and fun to see how people tackle problems and implement solutions, the point here is they are experiments.. not real world solutions.

What annoys me is when the fan-boi parade comes to town and starts telling everyone how great a solution is because it used X technology instead of Y or Z.

To make things even more irritating is when an ‘experiment’ is claimed as a great implementation to replace an existing practice when in fact the solution is simply X amount more complex to implement or just simply unstable.

For example, the use of many divs with css transforms, animation and z-indexing to mask and manipulate visual content all to get a result that could be more easily implemented in a couple of lines of js and a canvas element.. less mark-up.. less scripting.. plus more importantly faster real world application.

I’m not saying making Pong or generating animated images from pure CSS is wrong or building web widgets with way to many transformed/animated/masked html divs and JS is a waste of time. What I am saying is it’s fun to experiment and showcase someones creative ability, especially when it pushes the limits of a technology as we all know this helps to progress and improved on said technology. In real world terms though an experiment is unlikely to be practical as a solution and no amount of fan-boi fanfare and bandwagon chasing is going to make it anything more than an interesting/fun experiment.

Yes one day technology X may replace Y and Z but today it’s still X and if X is more practical, stable and faster to implement, then choosing an alternative is dumb!